CFP: Summer Session 2015, Cosmopolitanism, Citizenship and Human Rights (Deadline: May 1, 2015)
CALL FOR PAPERS SUMMER SESSION 2015
COSMOPOLITANISM, CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN RIGHTS
The summer session will be held in Druskininkai, Lithuania, from the 18th of July to 25th of July 2015 (See http://nsuweb.net/wb/ )
Contact Information for Coordinators:
Oleg Bresky
oleg.bresky@gmail.com
Mogens Chrom Jacobsen
chrom.jacobsen@gmail.com
The deadline to submit proposals is May 1, 2015. Please send title and abstract to both coordinators
Preliminary program announced: May 15, 2015 on www.nsuweb.net where you can also find more information about NSU, the summer session and sign up for the newsletter.
Please visit http://www.nsuweb.net/first/html/ for important information regarding the conference.
-Registration fee is paid online and includes hotel cost, meals and conference fee
-There are some scholarships available for students and grants available for others in need. Detailed information on how to apply will come after proposals are submitted.
Arrival: Saturday July 18, 2015
Departure: Saturday July 25, 2015
For the summer session 2015 we would propose a special opening focus on:
COSMOPOLITANISM, CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN RIGHTS
An opening focus will only head the program of the winter session sincerely inviting papers on other subjects related to our six themes in the program to follow.
Human rights is not only conceived as normative, but also as embedded in the global society. To what extent does ideas about international/regional/national institutions and related notions of citizenship depend on/integrate human rights? Are new ideas of citizenship both empirically and on the level of ideas challenging old conceptions of citizenship? Are old tensions between human rights and citizenship (Hannah Arendt) absorbed by these new ideas? How inclusive are they? What about stateless people, refugees, immigrants? Has citizenship any meaning for them? What about the religious fundamentalists and traditional communities which reject human rights and the cosmopolitan project? Is cosmopolitanism a reality or an utopia? This is some of the questions which could be raised under this heading.
Human rights is a conception of moral philosophy with claims to universal validity, but it is also a legal regime based on treatises and jurisprudence with an international or regional status. HR is also a set of convictions more or less prevailing within local or global public opinion (if a global public opinion really exists). These convictions might be vehiculed or promoted by NGO’s, academics, churches, in short civil society, and as such it is sometime referred to as the human rights movement. HR is also subject to scrutiny by the social sciences as a part of diagnoses of contemporary conditions or processes (see for example Ulrich Beck).
If we define cosmopolitanism as the view that all human beings belong to a single community, based on a shared morality, we can define human rights as this shared morality. Mervyn Frost does this in his book, Global Ethics, and the question is discussed lively by Hervé Juvin and Gilles Lipovetsky in L’Occident mondialisé, Controverse sur la culture planétaire. Cosmopolitanism can also focus on shared political institutions. Within this strain of thought David Held and Daniele Archibugi speak about the ‘cosmopolitical’.There is here a double emphasis on transnational democracy and global civil society. Thomas Pogge in World Poverty and Human Rights also discusses human rights as the basis for a transnational solidarity. Peter Kemp has lately reconsidered the idea of the citizen of the world which Hans Kelsen had intertained in Peace through Law. Jürgen Habermas has focus more on regional institutions like the EU and the Council of Europe in his reflections on cosmopolitanism.
Over the last decades most of the states involved in the issues of citizenship. Some of these problems, like the patterns and degrees of citizen’s participation in politics and issues of civic education, are very old. Others, like the causes and consequences of migration, questions of integrating immigrants into existing nation-states, global citizenship, and new forms of participation and exclusion have become more urgent and complex due to trends toward globalization and regionalisation. This at a time when economically induced migrations and cultural clashes increase the need for belonging to groups capable of providing individuals and families with not only basic securities, but also with meaningful, socially supported modes of life.
With these efforts we hope to contribute to a better understanding of the problems confronting modern states and new forms of citizenship and forms of belonging and participation in public life. Whether such understanding will contribute to addressing and solving those problems in the spirit of basic human rights could in part determine the future course and well being of modern democracies, and of new forms of political communities.